


A Kingdom of Gold to one of Iron and Rust

by TheLightdancer



Series: The Phoenix Multiverse [5]
Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: F/F, Silver Millennium Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:46:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23364166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: A two parter set in the Silver Millennium, where Uranus and Neptune face the first stirrings of a very old enemy and at the Doors of Time Pluto sees events beginning to take their course
Relationships: Kaiou Michiru/Tenoh Haruka
Series: The Phoenix Multiverse [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1430596
Kudos: 7





	1. All our Yesterdays

CHARON CASTLE:

Sailor Pluto seldom had the luxury to come here, but it was a luxury she was savoring to the fullest. The Doors were a harsh fate, stern and cruel. To know all of time and space and to be helpless to watch. Her mother, so distant and lonely, had always had this bittersweet sadness toward her and with her, and she did not fully understand why until she had learned of her death in her Senshi duties, four thousand years prior. Her death and that of all of the prior generation and iteration of the Senshi. Her mother had known, she had known the manner and the date and the hour of her death and Setsuna knew all of hers. She could see them. She knew what her mother had also known, that after thousands of years where the Senshi repelled monsters and the vagabonds of the Galaxy, the Great Enemy was stirring again. Something had changed, something dark and terrible. The most powerful of all the Senshi had done....something....with the Great Enemy centuries ago and since then only silence.

Silence and the duty of the Doors.

And then she felt It. The Great Enemy, the Nothingness behind reality, the endless Hunger that slaked and dyed worlds with blood and left them ashes, with grave-winds whispering of the lost worlds. And eyes, bright and terrible, bleeding with the light of murdered suns. Eyes and a voice from a queen of the Dreaming, and something monstrous that had taken residence in the Sun, the Sun, so central and such a sustaining force to the power of the Senshi and of the crystals. Long ago there had been questions on why there was no Guardian of the Sun as there were of the other bodies. None said much save that the Golden Crystal that contained the power of the Earth had its ties to the Sun. Only Setsuna and her mother and the monarch knew the answers to that question, remembered when Sailors Terra and Sol had sacrificed themselves and seen their Star Seeds obliterated by the dreadful power of Chaos and the corrupted daemon of fire that it had made out of the Muspel-Jotunn that head welcomed its embrace.

Four thousand years of silence, and of the protection of her fellow Guardians. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus.

With the Queen, Setsuna shared the burden of the knowledge of Sailor Saturn, and the cruel memories of the dreadful things that had been done with her, to her, and the erasure of the memories of the Guardians.

Neptune and Uranus's love for each other was no secret either, though it was beautiful, it was also sad. And at some level Setsuna envied it. The closest she had were feelings more than romantic toward Queen Serenity, and of the Monarch's regret in indulging them. Knowing this, neither of them said a word at the furtive and desperate seeking to remember they were human on the part of Uranus and Neptune. Too much being lost in the power of the Senshi led to the smiling woman clad in gold and to the terrible fate, her third death, that she saw of a future that was not yet and was yet so very vivid. So yes, humanity.

Humanity in furtive couplings for those fortunate enough to have it and not dammed and damned in the heart of Saturn, nor those lost in the eternal timelessness where past-present-future and the terrible cycle blurred and where the identities of each generation of the Senshi were so easily transposed by souls that the sight of the partial and total power of each were things awe-inspiring to behold.

And now the Great Enemy was awake. Pulsing in the heart of the Sun, and it was her duty to keep silent, and to know the things that cats knew that made them scream in the night, and at times she stepped just aside from the endless chill of the Doors to scream herself, to let out the emotions hidden in isolation and the painful and fearful loneliness.

She slept soundly in her bed and dreamed pleasant dreams of the future, even interspersed with its three deaths, and of the warmth of a little girl who would one day be free, if still given harsh and cruel fates by the callousness of the uncaring universe. Then, her human weaknesses assuaged, she stepped toward the Doors and all of Time was hers to see anew.

TRITON CASTLE, NEPTUNE:

Viewscreens were not meant for this, and she had a very good feeling Guardian Uranus would be anything but pleased if she knew. Guardian Neptune could not bring herself to care. Centuries had lapsed from the last major incursions and the probing of hostile alien species of human and non-human natures were trivially easy to disperse. She knew the warnings her majesty had given, and her seldom-seen ally from Pluto as well. She knew of the Great Enemy, but all her mirror showed her were battlefields and something too monstrous for words. Something dark and terrible arising in the heart of the Earth through a monster's words seducing a sorceress and bequeathing her with the power of Chaos, seeking to slake a lust never hers to claim.

The idea that the endless beauty of the Silver Millennium would fall was ridiculous. Four thousand years had Queen Serenity reigned, heir to her mother, Queen Selenity, and on through the very founder of the mystical realm across the stars, Queen Luna. Four thousand years and at the very dawn of her reign, when she was still the princess and still a century the Great Enemy had been vanished in the Battle of the Field of Corpses, leaving only Queen Serenity left. She did not speak much of it, but all trusted in the power of the Queen and none more than the Outers who so seldom saw her light.

Guardian Neptune knew that the more flamboyant Guardian Uranus was often seen as the most powerful of the Senshi but in truth that was not so. She was immensely physically strong, strongest of all of them. If a foe needed a brute force battering ram to hit it in the face with World Shaking and to destroy it with her sword, she was perfect. If it needed literally anything else....she could run at it with great speed and World Shaking and hit it with her sword.

Neptune shook her head. It was a bit unfair to see her that way, for most of the time what she did face did fall apart to just that. Her own experiences tended to be more boring than anything else. Her talisman and mastery over the deep mysteries and knowledge of ocean, which was more ancient than mountains and freighted with the dreams and weight of time, meant that where Guardian Uranus at least achieved satisfaction in their couplings and in the battlefield, it was those ever-so-brief interspersed moments of loneliness that were there. Was it love? In truth she did not think so and she knew Guardian Uranus didn't. She loved women, only women, Guardian Uranus had been betrothed to a soldier and very deeply in love with him until the last incursion centuries ago had hewn him in half in front of her.

Some treacherous part of her heart had rejoiced in the man's death, for now there would be no further obstacles and none of the distance.

If she had been given an offer to have anything in the world, anything at all, it would be to have Guardian Uranus at her side.

But that was the human part and the weakness, and she was Ocean, and its depths and knowledge and frenzied wild power. She could not afford more than the reminders to be humble, the same kind of reminders that the Four Heavenly Kings gave the Inner Senshi (even if the Heavenly Kings knew and approved of dalliances within the Senshi ranks, even as two of them shared a dalliance themselves). She was ocean, and it was the deep darkness, the endless night of dreams that was giving her warning.

Something sickly and smelling of blood and the grave was rising, rising with eyes of fire and bloodstained teeth, and an endless thrumming anti-sound. She blinked, taking a deep breath to calm herself. This was her sacred duty, if Chaos reared its ugly head.

All of them knew the name of the Great Enemy, though only four thousand years lapse led to Uranus and Neptune using the name directly and derisively, and then only in their castles talking to the Guardian spirits of same. And she knew what she was starting to feel but that was impossible. The Great Enemy had been banished for all time between the feat of the legendary Galaxia and of their own Queen, the ancient allies working together.

And yet it was Chaos she was starting to feel. Worries prickled at her, the power of Ocean aching to meet the ancient foe anew, to test and to try strength. There was no overt enemy, not yet. So she watched, on her viewscreen.

She watched Guardian Uranus sparring with a combat droid, nine arms with deadly weapons, her bewildering speed and power something that only careful observation amplified by the times of working together had shown her. The Space Sword shone with a brilliant light, and it and She were more than matches for the droid. Guardian Uranus was sweet, and she was as insipidly weak as the Inner Senshi and tried so vainly to hide that with her bluster, and with the sheer destructive power of her attacks. Observation, and obsession, had shown her much.

What Venus was to all of them, she was to the Outer Senshi, the strategist, and the general. This was her excuse and her rationale but in truth it was an obsession with someone so free to showcase everything within at one level and so careful to shield away that compassion that made her a better woman, a better Senshi. She was bitter, she knew, but then what was bitterness but isolation with the only relief battles against foes that gave power outs but not uses that truly justified it, and the sense of wanting something she was never, ever going to have in the loneliness of her existence? To be one of the Guardians was no easy fate, she knew.

And yet......

Her eyes watched Uranus sparring with the droid, and ultimately deactivating it after several hours and flexing. Her eyes watched hungrily and she took an image frozen of Uranus stretching in her exercise robes and began her newest sketch. The sickly oil-like bloody element of the Nothingness was starting to taint things, if faintly. The more reason to preserve the truthful beauty of her secret love.

OBERON:

It was on the Uranian moon the Uranians called Barrow and future generations would call Oberon that the Great Enemy would make its first return, a dim shadow of what was starting its path on Earth with the conversion of the youthful mage Beryl to the side of Chaos itself. The power that was buried there was from the corpse of a greater Youma that had formed in those distant days of the prior iteration of the Senshi, buried but its ashes not purified. Happy the tomb where no wizard has lain, and happy the town at night whose sorcerers were all ashes. Chaos pulsed from the Sun as Metallia sent her first siren song out, the first strand in the doom of the Silver Millennium and the opportunity that Nehellenia had shown her beginning to work. Chaos pulsed but it took the pulses time, a long time, to reach the first place where the first encroachment could begin and send its warnings.

Ashes began to form a body, tall and simian-like and misshapen, vast forelimbs and puny hindlimbs with a sloped back. It had nine eyes arranged as a spider's and a fanged mouth that had four sharp elements extending outward like tusks, two downward and two upward. Spines ridged its back. The thing was vaguely akin to that of the simians of the forests of Terra, though its fur was patchy and things like scales but not like them were there in its stead. In the thin atmosphere of Oberon it raised its head and made a soundless shriek, beating its chest.

MIRANDA CASTLE:

Guardian Uranus awoke from sleep, an ancient alarm that she had never heard beginning to chime. It was like the pealing of bells, and in them unknown to her was the beginning ticking of a doomsday clock that would not bear fruit for another two centuries. She awoke and found herself in her fuku, donning her Talisman. The wind was her ally as she teleported over, the first of the Senshi in centuries to face an incursion, the first in four millennia to face Chaos itself.

TRITON CASTLE:

Neptune awoke from a terrible dream, Uranus on the Barrow-Moon, her beloved Guardian fighting with all the dreadful power at her disposal, fighting with beauty and wonder that made her weep, as she wiped away the tears. Uranus fighting but the monster proving more powerful and resilient, faking its death and then reaching up to grasp her and to tear her in half, first of the Senshi to be broken. It would not happen, it could not. She summoned her mirror and clad in her fuku, willed herself to arrive at Oberon and so she did.

OBERON: 

Her arrival right at the sight of the darkness did not prepare Uranus for what she saw. It was monstrous, four times the size of a human being. Gruesomely akin to a person, or to a simian, save that it had reddish scales, several of which seemed coated in eyes, sharp ridged spines on its side, and nine black eyes that gleamed with something horribly akin to starlight. It saw her immediately, knowing her for what she was, and as she stared in blank horror and lack of comprehension, it reared on its hind limbs and beat its massive forelimbs, releasing another silent shriek. The moment passed and she blinked, paused, trusted in her Senshi magic, and closed her eyes. The wind knew its master and appeared even in a vacuum, the gusts throwing off the rhythm of the creature's movements, meaning that its sluggish (to her) piledriver blows missed. She fired a blast from the Space Sword, empowered by the fierce love of life at her heart, all the softness she kept hidden from the painful words of Neptune and Venus on it, the pain scarred on her heart and meaning for all that she had her times of humanity with Neptune, she could never see herself in love with her.

She was not weak, any more than the Princess or the Queen were. The Sword empowered by rays that reflected kindness and love lanced deeply into the monster, making it retreat slightly before it tried to barrel into her. Flipping effortlessly in a soumersault, her sword blazed again and she hurled the blade in mid-air, twisting to the kind of flight that was her greatest pleasure in her castle and in Uranus itself, jamming the blade firmly into the beast's skull. The thing seemed to freeze solid and then fell down, as she withdrew the blade and stood triumphantly by it. If this was the Great Enem-

A brilliant flash of shining aqua-green and the briny oceanic smell of Neptune made Uranus pause and then turn around and there she was. Her aqua hair brilliant as her stoic expression, her talisman at the ready. Distracted by her brilliance and the start of surging conflicted emotions, Uranus missed the signs of the creature twitching and starting to raise itself to its feet, its hand reaching out to grasp her until a brilliant flash and more of the briny power of Neptune, water, pure perfect saltwater, in the vacuum lanced out, disintegrating the creature's paw.

Senshi magic was capable of many wonders, not least of which was the ability to communicate in a thin atmosphere as well as unsuited mortals could on the surface of a habitable world.

"Honestly, Uranus. I get that you are a compassionate, tender soul. Focus on the battlefield."

The greeting was cold and it was stern, and the creature had been shaken by the damage done to its paw and unsteady. Unfortunately for both Uranus and Neptune the raw power of Chaos was not quite so easily felled even by wounds that were seemingly mortal when it took on the form of its Youma absent a mortal host that could be restored. The thing rose yet again and this time it barreled into not Uranus but Neptune, hurling her aside, before limping, the pain and slowing of its motions clear.

Uranus snarled and shouted

_Space Sword Blaster!_

The raw energy that lanced out impaled the creature, which began to crumble even as its paw came close enough to Uranus's body to brush her face and part of her throat, disintegrating into ashes.

Neptune dusted herself off, and glared at Uranus.

"If you had just done that the first time I wouldn't have needed to be here. There was no-one to save, and nothing to change."

With that, Neptune, though a Senshi of ocean, used her energy to ignite a mystical fire, poor and weak though it was relative to that of a Miko suited to the task. Following what other dreams had showed her, she sought to purify the ashes.

Uranus's look was forlorn and that of Neptune harsh and judging when two flashes of light followed, and she turned to see the usually serene and calm face of the Queen, now marred by clear fear and concern, and the scrutiny, hard and cold and the brutish appraisal of a well-honed general, toward Uranus, whose shoulders slumped slightly. Something in Neptune twinged to see that, but she could no more afford to show weakness before Marshal Venus than Uranus could.

"Come," Venus's word was a singular one, and it was frigid, as cold as the atmosphere of Oberon. With a look of wariness, Uranus went with Neptune, and all were teleported to a place that was a rarity for them to see. The beautiful Lunar Palace, the beating heart of the Empire of the Moon.


	2. The Doom that came to Sarnath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Secrets explained, and lies told to good ends

LUNAR PALACE:

When they had arrived, Marshal Venus had dragged off Uranus and Neptune looked at her when her back was turned with worry and fear. She knew Uranus was soft and that Venus was unforgiving and merciless as a master, cold and destructive. The idea of a fairly carefree, amusing Venus was as likely as the existence of a Sailor Saturn. Sighing imperceptibly, Neptune sank to her knees and began to meditate on and through her element. Ocean spoke through her and in its immenseness and its darkness she found that quietness and tranquility.

INTERROGATION ROOM:

Uranus sat down, flinching, awaiting the harsh words of Venus to add to those of Neptune. Venus appraised her closely, her keen eye traversing her. Uranus was shaking, whatever she'd encountered, something Venus knew only on an intellectual level, was something that was......not a pleasant experience.

"What did Neptune tell you?" 

The Marshal's question was much softer than her gaze.

"Not to be distracted on the battlefield."

"What led her to say that?"

"I stabbed....whatever that was...in the skull with my sword."

"Has anything lived through being stabbed with your talisman in the brain before?"

"No, Marshal."

"I did not think so."

Her fingers were steepled.

"Your tactics were sound, by all appearances what you slew was supposed to be dead. Is that how Neptune reacts to you, and with you?"

"Yes, Marshal. She keeps me disciplined and focused on fighting."

Venus's lips thinned.

"I know my own reputation is that of a brutish oaf, Guardian Uranus, but that in itself is a poor means to keep soldiers motivated. Fear makes people die, it does not make them live wisely. I fear that we have become martinets, playing at this."

"Marshal?"

"The Queen can tell you more, and I do not know what she will tell you. I will tell you that any doubts I still had from training and the few times I've served with you are gone. You faced no aliens here, but the real enemy, the Great Enemy. Four thousand years ago, in the form of the Fire-Giant Metallia, it was that Enemy that killed all of our predecessors. You faced no mere Youma that dons a person's form and transforms them and then can be dispelled by Senshi power, you faced the raw stuff of Chaos itself. The monster that gave your mother the limp that killed her in the Battle of the Field of Corpses." 

Uranus's eyes were wide and she fidgeted a little.

"You judge yourself too harshly, Amara. That wasn't a flaw in your approach, we have not seen the Great Enemy in four thousand years. Only the Queen truly knows how tough it is and how to put it down again. Even I don't know everything."

Uranus nodded, slightly, still trembling.

"Are you afraid I'm going to punish you?"

"I lost focus on the battlefield and endangered myself and my partner."

"Did the same thing happen to Guardian Neptune?"

"Um...."

"I'll take that as the yes it as and accept that as an answer. She knew enough of the danger that she spared your life, because the ability to See things is part of her many gifts. You did nothing wrong, Amara, I repeat."

Uranus nodded, quietly and softly. Then the Marshal did something she rarely allowed herself to do and the person beneath the two titles showed just a little.

"So what was it like?"

"Like nothing I'd ever seen or imagined. It felt....empty. Empty of everything but hate and bloodlust. It was a horrible thing, it didn't look like anything that ever really existed or could exist."

The Marshal nodded.

"The Queen told me enough of the truth that I can tell you that is what the Great Enemy is. The nothingness behind everything, the desires of bad things and bad faith, brute force, injustice, oppression, and persecution. Only the right, love, compassion can truly prevail."

And with that a bit more of the person showed as she leaned forward slightly and put her hand on Uranus's shoulder.

"What you and Guardian Neptune have is your greatest strength against this enemy. Ruthlessness works for aliens, for the kind of foes that fall before magic without magic of their own. This one, Chaos? Love, the same love that fuels this kingdom is is true bane. Love is what you allow yourself to feel....and what I do not think Guardian Neptune can, as yet. Now that It has awoken once more, you will need to let it be so, both of you."

She grimaced.

"Or else It shall devour us all and leave nothing but ruin in its wake. You faced Chaos for the first time in four thousand years and gave better than you got. Good work, soldier."

With that Uranus stood up and saluted her in the best military discipline that she could muster, her hand clenched in a fist and hitting her heart. Venus returned the salute.

"Go get a drink and relax, Uranus."

Then she looked out.

"Guardian Neptune, please come in."

The civility in the words did not match the tone or her stare, though Guardian Neptune stepped in with much greater serenity. She'd been proven right, after all. Uranus was too weak for combat, too beautiful for it. Too in need of protection.

When the door shut, she saw the Marshal seated with her hands steepled.

"Sit down."

The words were colder than the ones that welcomed her, and Neptune did take her seat, still cool and chill.

"Did you really think those modifications of what you use your viewscreens for would go undetected, Guardian Neptune?"

Whatever she'd expected the Marshal to start with, that was not it, and her jolted appearance and pulling at her collar confirmed as such. 

That pulling her collar was the singular concession to human weakness she allowed herself.

"Guardian Uranus is weak, Marshal. She cannot fight well, she lacks the ruthlessness to do more than charge in with brute force. If it's a situation that calls for it, fine. Everything else? She charges in with brute force. You know she is the weak link of our group of Senshi."

The Marshal's stare became colder still.

"I command the Senshi, Guardian Neptune, including you Outer Senshi."

Neptune's stare was level.

"And I provide the plans for my group of Senshi."

"They are not your group," the Marshal's words were now so cold Neptune not so idly checked for ice and frosting breath in the room.

"You are entrusted with ensuring that they adhere to my directives, not directives of your own. You do not have the right to spy on and invade the privacy of another Senshi, and to hijack her viewscreen and to do everything you've been doing to it, and then to turn around and defend that conduct to me, nor to justify your treatment of Uranus."

The Marshal's stare remained cold and Neptune found herself shivering, a concession of weakness that would have seen the Inners, Uranus, or Pluto cringing expecting more of the rough discipline that kept soldiers functional.

"Yes, she is compassionate, she is loving. She is closer to the heart of what sustains this kingdom than you or Pluto are. It is her task, not to be the heart of the Outer Senshi, but to be your conscience, your connection to human compassion. She is not meant to be like you or Pluto. Do not try to make her into it, all it would do is get you both killed. Against the foes that we have faced for centuries, her approach is successful more often than not, and against the Great Enemy, her approach will be more successful than yours as you have it." 

Neptune's composure cracked just a margin more, and with a not so slight growling undertone she leaned forward.

"I am the most powerful of the Outer-"

"That does not help against this foe."

The Marshal stood up, hands behind her back in parade rest.

"You face a foe, Guardian Neptune, that is emptiness and bloodlust. It is Nothingness, Neverborn. Raw power does not stop it, it can only contain it, at best. Love, compassion, all the things you and I do so good a job burying, it is what bests this foe."

A shadow crossed the Marshal's face.

"I am not sure, if the Great Enemy comes back in strength, if we can face it with success for that reason. I have become hard, cruel, lost in my task and in keeping all of you vigilant. And now that it is here, what works best against it has been so buried I do not know if I can ever bring it back."

She sighed for a moment.

"All of that aside, how precisely do you 'help' Guardian Uranus with what you see as weaknesses?"

"I toughen her up verbally, if necessary, physically."

"And then you fuck her after keeping her afraid of you and desperate to keep you happy, hmm?"

The bluntness of the question made Guardian Neptune splutter, her composure at last cracked beyond repair, her face reddening.

"I do not object to the relationship, Guardian Neptune. To become lost in power is to become as destructive as the Great Enemy. It is feared this has already happened to Guardian Galaxia, if not moreso."

The Marshal's nose twitched.

"I have never met her, though she is an old friend of the Queen's, or so I was told. To become like her is no good fate, nor a sign of good strength or wit or will."

Her stare bored more deeply into Neptune who wished to crawl into a corner and hide.

"Leave the harsh words where they need to be spoken to me, from now on. Your tasks are hard, and they are no way to live save by the blessing and orders of the Queen. Your happiness and love is few and far between. To face this enemy, and to enact what could become necessary.....you will need it. All of it."

With that, she said:

"Dismissed, soldier."

Saluting her, Guardian Neptune saw her return the salute and headed out, finding herself seated by Guardian Uranus, whose head was in her hands.

Seeing her trembling, Guardian Neptune hesitated for a moment, then reached out to put her hand around her shoulder.

"For what it's worth, Uranus, I was wrong. I am sorry. You did well, there was no way, absent my visions, to know that thing wasn't dead."

Uranus kept trembling, and Neptune, whose composure had already cracked after the encounter with the fearsome Field Marshal and supreme commander of the armies, decided nothing could be further lost or damaged by her extending the embrace and lowering her chin, as she heard Uranus mumbling something about 'that monster killed my mother' and her eyes widened slightly. That just meant that the embrace strengthened, and then the two walked hand in hand to their shared apartment, where Neptune fell upon Uranus, pushing her to the bed, and waited to see if Uranus nodded, which she did with a bit of bemusement and sorrow and even a bit of the fear Neptune studiously refused to admit, nor that it further proved the warning of the Field Marshal. 

As always in this golden age it was too brief, Uranus coming undone between her lips and her fingers, her own lips rewarding her. In that pleasure and the heat of a human connection they were reminded that for all their longevity and eternal beauty and youth, they were human, once, and would be again each time. They dozed off in each other's arms, the intense isolation of the terrible duties they faced faded in moments ever so brief. Moments that would endure the most vividly in Uranus's memories, though all of it would remain in the memories of the future Kaioh Michiru, and provided an extra bittersweetness to realizing what she did have...and its own signs of the fear of what she could become, and why she made so vivid an effort to suppress emotions. For the two Senshi of the Silver Millennium, it was but a moment in the endless days of sorrow and isolation that marked a hellish kind of existence made the more terrible by its sheer endlessness.

THRONEROOM OF THE LUNAR PALACE:

The expression on Serenity's face was one of pallor, a bit haggard. More humanity than the two Outer Senshi had ever expected from their Queen. The warnings of Marshal Venus did not help matters, it made them more anxious, not less.

When they arrived, they did so together wearing the formal dresses of the Guardians in civilian outfits, Uranus surprisingly comfortable in them for someone who so often wore a more military kind of dress outfit. Their eyes met cautiously, uncertain as to what they were to face. Serenity visibly gathered herself and set in the mask of calmness and tranquility, though it was clearly false.

All they heard from her was "Well done on facing the Great Enemy, my faithful Senshi. In your hands the future is making the only kind of turn it is guaranteed to make, a good one."

They raised eyebrows, and then as the courtiers departed, the Queen spoke more honestly.

"That was a creature of Chaos I believed destroyed four thousand years ago. It wounded your mother, Amara. She......I told her that it would be all right, that we would be able to best Metallia and that the temporary healing I gave her could be replaced by a better one."

Her lips were tight and her face pale.

"There's a Sorceress on Earth who oozes the power and influence of Chaos. I have forbidden contact with the Earth, in hopes that it will be possible to send energy to and with the Golden Crystal there to cleanse it. It is a gamble. I am aware. I saw all of my Senshi die to protect me once. I cannot do that to any of you, or to your star seeds, again."

She sighed.

"You fought that creature alone and did better than your mother did with the help of Neptune's and Pluto's. Your powers are stronger than those of the first Senshi. I do not know if this is a result of the power that has returned, or if it is simply a generational thing."

Her hands steepled and her light shone the more brilliantly and it was wondrous and welcoming.

"I cannot tell you everything of the Great Enemy, for I do not know everything, or even most things to tell. I know what we saw, and what we fought. Galaxia, my old friend, knew more than any of us and I fear she delve too deeply into the mysteries so I would not even if I had the knowledge at my disposal."

Uranus and Neptune nodded.

"Hold onto love, my Senshi, because love will prevail over this. The darkness has only the power we choose to let it, the monsters are only as real as we allow them to be.

Uranus nodded more than Neptune, and the Queen's gaze turned to her.

"It has never been easy for you to love, Neptune. You are the Senshi of the ocean and like the ocean you hide many things beneath. It may sound foolish that love banishes the deep nothingness, but it is what makes life different from unlife, the Born from that which is Neverborn."

Neptune tried to hide her skepticism and clearly did not do as good a job as she wished given the Queen's skepticism.

"To celebrate your triumph, there shall be a ball, the last one where the children of Earth shall be invited to join us before the gates close. Keep an eye on them, especially on their rulers and their Crown Prince."

On that cryptic note they were dismissed.

DOORS OF TIME:

Setsuna watched her two colleagues and future family step outward with the information they were given. She watched the immediate and the distant futures. Stoic and powerful and an embodiment of time and space itself, she watched. A single tear fell down her face at what she saw as the tides of the Dark Kingdom began to draw the ocean back, storing up its power for the deep waters to reach out and close over them all and destroy everything their path absolutely and unrelentingly.


End file.
